By Martin Brunt, crime correspondent, at Leicester Crown Court
One of the first things Julia Wandelt told her lawyer was that she didn’t think she was the daughter of her parents.
They had different hair and eye colourings, they were reluctant to talk about her childhood, there were no early family photographs and her parents refused to show her her birth certificate or take a DNA test, she told the court.
She was abused by an elderly relative, a man her father told her had once kidnapped someone.
She said she began to think she might have been abducted and started researching missing person websites.
That’s when she came across the case of Madeleine McCann, a name she had never heard before, she said.
Although their ages appeared to be different, she thought she could be Madeleine and started researching her case.
Her lawyer asked her if she was attracted to the Madeleine case because of the publicity? “No,” she said.
Were you attracted by the possibility of making financial gain, her lawyer asked. “No,” she replied.
What was your interest?
“I just wanted to find out who I am.”
She later discovered her abuser shared the same surname as a previous suspect in the Madeleine case. That was “a big factor” for her, she told the court.